When Julia Fox was 16, missing person posters bearing her face were plastered all over New York. She’d run away from home where her parents fought endlessly, often beat her and usually neglected her.
Fox’s childhood had been spent bouncing between her father’s native New York and her mother’s homeland of Italy. There’d been spells of homelessness, she shoplifted, took every drug going and had sex with often much, much older men. When she moved in with her abusive drug-dealer boyfriend, it took her parents (who thought she was in Italy) several weeks to clock her absence and inform the police.
Her boyfriend toured Manhattan, ripping down the posters and proudly presenting a heap of them to her. Fox was outraged. Not only had her parents chosen an unflattering photo but they’d got the year of her birth, her height and her weight wrong.
“It was so embarrassing how little they knew about me,” Fox, 34, says now. “It made me feel I’d done the right thing running away. I was so angry, thinking, ‘What is wrong with me?’ But now I think it’s funny. It’s like actually, what the f*** was wrong with my parents? Life really sucks but I’m always laughing.”
Fox went on to support herself by working as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon, then by finding a billionaire sugar daddy. But most people will know her because, for about a month in 2022, she became the girlfriend of rapper Kanye West.
Some may also know her from starring in the 2019 film Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler. Many more won’t realize that the catchy lyrics of “360,” a song onBrat, Charli XCX’s album of the summer — “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia” — is a reference to Fox and her status as fashion idol (she hosts the show OMG Fashun on the E! channel) and woman about town. “[Fox] started every trend of 2022,” the British pop star explained.
Many simply describe Fox as an It girl. “The first time I heard that in reference to me was around 2014 — a long time ago,” Fox says. “Even though I wasn’t mainstream famous, I was always really famous in New York. Everybody knew me because I was rowdy and crazy. A lot of lore surrounded me.” She pauses to inhale on a lilac vape. “When people met me they always did this backhanded, ‘You’re nothing like we thought.’ But I’m much more comfortable being an anti It girl. I’m an artist. I’m a mother, a sister, friend, writer, muse, actress — it varies day to day. But ultimately, I’m just a freak.”
Certainly Fox — talking over Zoom from the back of a car in Los Angeles, utterly without airs — is a total original, with a persona very far from today’s sanitized, platitude-laden Hollywood. It’s more old-school, Andy Warhol, seamy Lower East Side. Like many, I’d viewed her initially as professional arm candy (she’s also had relationships with Leonardo DiCaprio and Drake). But after reading her New York Times best-selling and critically acclaimed memoir, Down the Drain, just published in paperback, I rethought everything.
A single mother of three-year-old Valentino, Fox, who wrote the book herself (very unusual), has created a shocking, often hilarious page-turner in which she comes across as an outlier with a rare capacity for having riotous fun rather than worrying about image, while being completely frank about everything from sex and addiction (she’s overdosed twice) to her stint in a psychiatric institution. The honesty extends to her social media: last year her 1.9 million TikTok followers were amazed by her video of her cramped, messy Manhattan flat “with a mouse problem” — just like theirs. “I love you! UR normal,” was a typical viewer’s comment.
“I tried to keep the book pretty PG. It could have been a lot, lot worse,” she says, which makes the mind boggle given its anecdotes about overdosing on heroin, being drugged by a stranger on a private jet (she wakes up hours later naked beside him in bed, but makes herself feel better about the incident by persuading him to buy her a $6500 diamond earring) and urinating on a dungeon client’s face.
She wrote the book to counter the thousands of false clickbait articles about her, though in this case the truth is far wackier than any fiction. Documenting her extraordinary past was also cathartic.
“I had to really relive my past. But from a more mature lens, I can look back on this stuff and not feel horrible about it. I’m at peace with it. I’m not ashamed. I went through those stages of feeling I needed to hide all this stuff and there’s no happiness in that. You have to own your life and mistakes and decisions and also come to terms with [the fact] sometimes it’s not your fault. I don’t feel guilty because I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t done all that shit.” As she says in the book, “You need to throw your whole life down the drain, just to see where you come out on the other side.”
If she’s rueful about anything it’s her brief but notorious relationship with West, whom she calls “the artist” in the book. “I regret that relationship so much. I hate it! It was only a few weeks but enough to last me a lifetime. I was in probably the most uncomfortable position in my life and that’s saying a lot. I don’t want to be known for being anyone’s girlfriend.”
“I was always really famous in New York. Everybody knew me because I was rowdy and crazy.”
They met just before his career was damaged by a series of antisemitic remarks. Fox was furious with her ex-husband of a few months, the Russian pilot Peter Artemiev, who’d left her bringing up their baby alone. She was posting pictures of him on Instagram asking, “Have you seen this deadbeat dad?”
Hooking up with one of the most famous men on the planet was a glorious revenge, but West’s insistence they flaunt the relationship to the world made her suspect he was using her to get back at his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. “It wasn’t my idea for it to go public. If anything, I was like, ‘We should wait,’ and then boom, it was done behind my back. I realized pretty quickly I was being used as a pawn.”
Before their meetings, West would send a stylist to put Fox into an outfit he had approved. On one of their early dates, a photographer was present; afterwards, West sent photos of them kissing to the editor of Interview magazine and asked Fox to write accompanying text about how they met. He didn’t like her words and replaced them with an entirely fabricated version, which she told him, correctly, sounded “dumb”. It’s online to this day.
They never had sex. In one of their few unobserved meetings in a hotel room they played Uno. He told her, “I’ll get you a boob job.” She refused. She dumped him after he repeatedly nagged her to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “I can’t be friends with you if you don’t sign it,” he texted. “I’ll live,” she replied.
Previously, Fox might have let the relationship drag messily on; now she walked away decisively. “I really credit my son for being my grounding force. It was like, I can’t go down this spiral because no man, no matter how rich or famous, is worth one minute away from my child.”’
If she’s annoyed at herself for being briefly dazzled by West, she’s let go of all animus against him. “I’m not about to hold a grudge and make my life miserable because I’m still angry about something. At some point you have to forgive and move on, because you think you’re hurting the other person but you’re really just hurting yourself,” she says.
Her narrative’s lack of poor-me is very refreshing. She’s never had therapy and scarcely mentions her diagnoses of ADHD and bipolar disorder. Instead, as mentioned, Fox copes by laughing at adversity. “You have to find humor in the tragicness of it all. Otherwise you’d kill yourself. Everyone has trauma and things they carry with them, and I think it’s so important to maintain perspective and not go into the victim mindset. That’s the worst. That’s the killer.”
She’s equally munificent toward her parents. Fox’s American father, with whom she mainly lived from the age of six, was a builder. She and her younger brother, Christopher, who last year was arrested for having bomb-making material and evidence of narcotics manufacturing in his Manhattan flat, lived all over New York with him — often on his boat, various squats and houses he was renovating. “Sometimes [Dad’s] funny and caring and easygoing and sometimes he breaks a chair over my head for something as bizarre as not wanting to read the Bible because he decided he’s religious overnight,” she writes. But he could be perversely helpful: when Fox was taking weekly drug tests to stay in high school, he gave her samples of his urine so she could continue partying and still pass.
Her mother, often absent in Italy, was much colder. When Fox, covered in bruises after her boyfriend dangled her out of a window, eventually gave herself up to the police after her runaway spell, her mother greeted her with the words, “You gained so much weight.” When a friend called her begging for help after Fox overdosed on heroin, she hung up on her. “I never had a real mother,” she writes.
Instead, Fox “found comfort in the gritty chaos” of New York’s underworld, often preferring to sleep on park benches and in cars to going home. Her voluptuous figure brought her nonstop male attention. She had her first kiss at 11 with a 26-year-old and lost her virginity at 14 to a 23-year-old. She mentions in passing a handful of abortions and in one chapter describes finding a wax ball in her knickers in a nightclub lavatory and realizing too late that she’s flushed away a miscarriage. “I feel bad that I couldn’t give it a more dignified arrangement.”
She was 18 and on probation for identity theft when she answered an advert for a dominatrix — “no sex, no nudity, no experience necessary” — because the money was good. She was a hit with clients because she did whatever was asked: squeezing one man’s testicles in a vice while blowing cigarette smoke for hours through a tube into his mouth; having a British businessman flog her in a room surrounded by mirrors.
Soon she was taken under the wing of a married Indian billionaire, who for the next five years showered her with designer clothes, paid for her and two friends to live in a flat in SoHo and bankrolled their fledgling fashion business while Fox had passionate affairs behind his back, not to mention endless episodes of class A drug binges, detoxes, relapses and so on and on.
After her business nearly derailed when someone set up an Instagram account full of details of her dominatrix past, she decided it was time to control her narrative. She self-published a book chronicling her past, including the nude Polaroids she sent her dealer boyfriend in prison and his inmate tag. It sold out. An art exhibition called PTSD followed, featuring a Tracey Emin-style recreation of her bedroom. In another called RIP Julia Fox, she exhibited paintings made with her own blood.
“I think it’s so important to maintain perspective and not go into the victim mindset. That’s the worst. That’s the killer.”
Fox’s avant-garde style — wearing dresses made out of condoms, dried leaves or shower curtains — brought her to the attention of hip magazines such as i-D and to the Safdie brothers, directors of Uncut Gems.
The film received rave reviews, but Fox’s acting career was halted by Covid, although now it’s picking up: she’s shooting a film called Perfect in which she plays a “horny pregnant lady in a lesbian romance” — a very on-brand role. At the Uncut Gems wrap party, she met Artemiev and married him two months later. That ended quickly and acrimoniously, although today she says he’s a good father.
Until then Fox had relied on her sex appeal to survive. “The only reason I’m not homeless and in a ditch is because I’m attractive,” she told one psychiatrist. “You’re also very smart,” he countered. She remembered his words and resolved to value her intelligence over her looks. The stress of her divorce caused her to shed weight and lose the curves that had brought her so much male attention. “I know I should be worried about my health, but with a murder to solve [finding a dealer who’d sold a friend drugs that killed him], children to raise and a movie to make, it’s not a priority at the moment,” she writes in one classic Fox sentence.
She realized she no longer wanted to please the male gaze, dying her eyebrows zombie white to underline this. “I post for the male gays and the girls,” she says of her social media.
Today she’s sworn off men entirely, saying the last time she had sex was when Valentino was one. “When you become a mum, especially a single mum, anything that isn’t serving you — people, places, habits, whatever — falls to the wayside. Sex was one of the things that didn’t make the cut. So much of my mental and emotional energy was always going to men and sex. Now I don’t have those things occupying my mind, I feel I’m on a whole other level of thinking. It’s like I’ve been liberated and transcended and I’m onto the next level in the video game of life.”
More and more women share her feelings: voluntary celibacy’s becoming a worldwide phenomenon. “I would love to be the spokesperson for that movement. I’m a great example of someone who let men go and then glowed up. It’s been an amazing, fascinating evolution. I always tell women, just don’t even waste your time [on men]. Focus on yourself, your career, your dreams, your friends. Those will give back. But with men it’s a bottomless pit — you pour and pour into them and they take and take until you’re a shell of a human. There are good men out there but unfortunately they’re not enough to offset the damage of the majority.”
Fox now thinks she’s a lesbian. “I’d definitely be up for a relationship with a woman. You cannot equate that to a relationship with a man. With a woman you’re with your bestie, whereas ultimately men are always going to prioritize other men over you. Men love other men and masculine shit, and watching homoerotic things such as wrestling and football. In this toxic culture I don’t think there’s room for them to love me.”
She’s not only abstained from sex but also from drugs, having lost several close friends to overdoses. She barely drinks, partly because wine “tastes like vinegar” but also because she has to be up early for Valentino. “These days I always leave the function early. I’m an adult and I just have to deal with it. Having a kid means fun is no longer on the agenda.”
She’s clearly a devoted mother, constantly talking to Valentino about his feelings and taking him everywhere with her for work (she has sole custody). Nonetheless, as you’d expect she’s candid about the realities of bringing up children.
“It’s a shock. You’re fed this really romanticized version of motherhood in order to keep doing it, then it happens and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is not at all what I thought it was going to be.’ You’re in mourning for who you used to be and your past life. You see your friends continue to be spontaneous and you’re like, that’s not me any more. You can pretend it is, but when it comes down to it you’re not going anywhere.”
Becoming a mother has made her “more compassionate”, not just toward her mother and father but all parents: the other day she passed a mum in her neighborhood yelling at her son. “I said to her, ‘You go, girl.’ Back in the day, I would have been like, ‘You’re abusing that child.’ Now I’m like, you never want to raise your voice but sometimes you have to, because kids will walk all over you and take advantage if you’re always nice to them. Stop romanticizing kids. They are f***ers. They’re demonic, evil, selfish people. Sometimes you have to put them in their place.”
Her book begins with a plea that her father never reads it. Has he, or her mother? “I think so. I don’t know. My family only talks about very superficial things.”
How would she feel about Valentino reading it? “I hope he doesn’t, but if he does, I want him to know that my kind of story is not as uncommon as it may seem. It’s just we live in a world where people tuck things away and only want to show the best part of themselves. I want to remind him people can make it out of really bad situations, and if they do, they’re going to be the most interesting person in the room. It’s about remarketing your misfortune as your greatest gift.”
Julia Llewellyn Smith is a journalist at The Times of London
